Hello world

Fra Mauro Map

• Drawing maps has a long history
• Fra Mauro map (1450) is the greatest memorial of medieval cartography
• Source: Wikipedia

Migrant route to Germany

• Used at BBC - get an overview of more maps like this here

The road to Europe

Source: The Independent

• Data on the conflict in Syria - UNHCR

• Analysis on Syrian Refugee Settlement Clinic Locations with R

Motivation

GDP per capita

Data source: World Development Indicators

GDP in German federal states

• Map produced with R-package sp

• Data source: Wikipedia

• Polygon source: Global Administrative Areas (GADM)

More detailed - more interesting?

Social index - Proportion of social benefits recipients in Berlin

Source: Tagesspiegel

Is the necessary data available?

Source

The spatial perspective…

• … is relevant to get an overview of current developments

• … is relevant to understand circumstances.

But how to get the adequate data?

• Necessary data is often not available
• More spatial visualisations are possible with web-data via Application Programming Interface (API)

A little quiz - which town is it?

Background info

• Map of photographic/traffic activity
• Data from flickr used
• Guess about picture taker’s mode of transportation
• Time stamps and distance traveled between a user’s pictures
  • Black is walking (less than 7mph),
  • Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph),
  • Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph);
  • Green is freeways or rapid transit.

New York

Source: Eric Fischer

Two ideas combined

• Map Of Touristiness

• Tracking Taxis Across Manhattan

• The geotaggers world atlas

World Map Of Touristiness

Source: Touristiness

Based on tourist pictures uploaded on panoramio

Locals and Tourists

• Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

• Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

• Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month).

Tourists and Locals

Source: Eric Fischer

Tracking Taxis Across Manhattan

Source: The New York Times

Target / Motivation

The target is to visualize social aspects in maps.

• Source: Platform Linked Data Nederland

• More examples

Spatial? - Motivation

• Massive amounts of data … and growing!
• Often freely accessible on the web (e.g. through APIs)
• Often unstructured or semi-structured (e.g. web documents, news archives), often heterogeneous
• Often not intended for geographic purposes, but implicitly containing geographic info implicitly (Web 2.0)
• Often with little or no metadata

Examples

Organisation

Targets

I want to….

• … show you examples of useful and less useful visualisations and applications.
• … talk about the developments of maps/geography.
• … clarify, why it is important for social sciences.
• … show you how to produce your own maps/visualisations.
• … tell you where you can find data.

Misunderstanding

Source: LOLDAMN

Learning by doing

Source

Targets

Every participant should present his/her own maps.

• Presentation of toolbox (R, Google API, OpenStreetMap etc.)
• Learning by doing is very important

Background

Personal information

University of Trier

Source: Website with city maps

Erasmus - Univerity Lyon III

Source: orangesmile

Mannheim

Source: Urban day

Gesis Mannheim

Organisation Gesis

Five departments - Survey Design and Methodology

• Monitoring Society and Social Change

• Data Archive for the Social Sciences

• Computational Social Science

• Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences

Gesis

GESIS is:

• Infrastructure Services for social sciences

• over 250 employees at three sites (Mannheim, Cologne)

GESIS offers:

• Consulting for research projects in all phases

• Research based services

Tasks GESIS-Team Statistics:

Consulting and research on …

• Planning of survey designs
• Development of sample designs for face-to-face, written, and telephone-assisted surveys
• Data analysis and visualisation

Your background?

• Where do you come from?
• What are you studying?
• What are your expectations from this course
• What are your research interests?
• Which map would be interesting for you?

Tools for this course

Tools and services

R programming language

R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Polls, surveys of data miners, and studies of scholarly literature databases show that R’s popularity has increased substantially in recent years.

Source: Wikipedia

Google maps

Google Maps is a desktop web mapping service developed by Google. It offers satellite imagery, street maps, 360° panoramic views of streets (Street View), real-time traffic conditions (Google Traffic), and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bicycle, or public transportation. Google Maps offers an API that allows maps to be embedded on third-party websites.

Source: Wikipedia

Open Street Map

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Two major driving forces behind the establishment and growth of OSM have been restrictions on use or availability of map information across much of the world and the advent of inexpensive portable satellite navigation devices.

Source: Wikipedia

Github

GitHub is a Web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. […] GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface and desktop as well as mobile integration. It also provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project.

Source: Wikipedia

Why use R - It’s open source

• It’s free
• It’s open source
• …

R is the leading tool for statistics, data analysis, and machine learning. It is more than a statistical package; it’s a programming language, so you can create your own objects, functions, and packages.

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/why-use-r/

Why use R - it is extremely comprehensive:

A big number (+5000) of (very specific) packages:

Overview of available packages on CRAN

Why use R - Quicklist of useful packages

• To load data - foreign, xlsx, RPostgresSQL

• To manipulate data - dplyr, tidyr

• To visualize data - ggplot2, lattice, DiagrammR

• To model data - lme4, survival

• To report results - rmarkdown, shiny, xtable

• For Spatial data - maptools, sp, ggmap

• For Time Series and Financial data - zoo, xts

• To write high performance R code - rcpp, data.table

• To work with the web - XML, jsonlite

• To write your own R packages - devtools, roxygen

Install and load packages

install.packages("lme4")
library(lme4)

Why use R - visualisation

a <- runif(10000)
hist(a,col="blue")

Visualisation examples

• Source: R-bloggers

• R graph gallery

Resources for advanced graphics

It is possible to create nice graphics:

• Producing Simple Graphs with R

• R Graphics by Paul Murrell

• Possibilities to visualize

• ggplot2 Tutorial

• Visualizing data in R

• Interview Hadley Wickham - R-Project Data Visualization Guru

Why use R - geographic information systems (GIS)

R can be used as GIS:

library(ggmap)
mapdist("Mannheim Hbf","Heidelberg Hbf")

##           from             to     m    km    miles seconds minutes
## 1 Mannheim Hbf Heidelberg Hbf 18250 18.25 11.34055    1122    18.7
##       hours
## 1 0.3116667

• Task view mapping

• spatstat: Spatial Point Pattern Analysis

• giswerk

R task view - spatial statistics

Virgilio Gómez-Rubio - Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R

Why use R - interfaces

• Interfaces with other programs, for example Javascript, ArcGis, GDAL and others…

Why use R - overview of reasons

Source: edureka!

Further reading

• Big data in the cloud

• Do I need to learn R?

• Why you should learn R first for data science

Github stack

Github page

• All relevant resources for this course will be available at:

https://github.com/Japhilko/GeoData/tree/master/2015

• Klick at files with extension .md, to see the information in the browser

Printing information

• If you want to print things, use the pdf-files

• Download the .pdf-files with the raw button

First steps in R

How to learn R

• Manuals on the R-project webpage

• Thomas Girke - Programming in R

• Use Reference cards, plot them and have them next to your computer

• How to get help in R

I will try to keep it simple and provide lots of resources.

Basic R

Download and install R

• Click here to download R for Windows.

• R for other platforms (Linux and Mac OS) is available under:

http://mirrors.softliste.de/cran/

Rstudio

Source: R-programming